AT&T Co’s NCR Corp has broadened its Open Networking Environment, ONE, support for enterprise-wide internetworking with enhancements to its StarWAN family of bridge-routers to give local area network speeds over wide area networks and communications capabilities to emerging network services. NCR StarWAN Release 4 includes new software and hardware features like enhanced SNA support with SDLC support and 16/4 Mbps Token Ring communications. To support local area network interconnect, several high-speed options have been added, including T3/E3 support, High Speed Serial Interface, Switched Multimegabit Data Service, Frame Relay and Single Mode Fibre Distributed Data Interface support. SNA enhancements to the NCR StarWAN Bridge Router family include SDLC transport and 16/4 Mbps Token Ring support. SDLC Transport is a set of features that allow SNA network users to access SNA applications via the open, standards-based StarWAN bridge router network. Rather than maintaining a parallel SNA network for SDLC data streams, traffic can be aggregated with Token Ring, Ethernet and FDDI local area networks into a single, high performance campus or wide area backbone network. Normal SDLC traffic can be transported over serial, Ethernet, Token Ring, FDDI, X25, Frame Relay, SMDS, T1/E1 or T3/E3 media. The NCR StarWAN Bridge Router Model 450 supports DS3, Fractional DS3, Switched T3, and SMDS T3 in the US, as well as E3 or 802.6/MAN in Europe, Australia, and the Far East. The Model 450 also supports up to four HSSI links for single-port high-speed connection to 52Mbps networks with throughput of up to 20,000 packets per second.
